ephas
7 April 2020
There are over 3.2 billion social media users. There are more than 4 billion monthly active users for messaging apps.
The whole world is on social media and odds are your customers too are. That means social media is a channel that you can use to grow and build brand awareness.
Posting content on social media is a proven channel to increase engagement. It increases the number of likes, shares ad reposts on your content.
Social media improves engagement and drives relevant traffic.
Here’s how you can use social media to grow your business.
Generate leads and boost conversions
If you can promote your products on social media, you will be able to generate valuable traffic from it. Boost conversions and increase the number of sales that happen as a result.
One way to do this is through contests. Create contests and get your followers to participate. Social media contests if they have a viral component can create wonders for your brand.
Add a link back to your site from your social media page and post links from the bio of your profile that lead to a landing page. Use a good landing page software so that you ensure that the landing page is designed well and optimised for conversions. Otherwise the results would be discouraging. For lead generation to work, you must have a social media content strategy in place.
On Facebook there’s the “shop on site” call to action you can enable. You can turn on the Shoppable tags feature on Instagram. These features tell visitors more about the product. Things like price, material, and size. This helps them make a decision and purchase from you.
Create relationships
Many brands in the cloud of being a brand forget that social media is about being social. It’s about being real in a way that you’re able to build lasting relationships between customers and your business. Interact with them when they comment on your posts, inspire the creation of user generated content, respond to their questions and the comments they’re asking and provide them with help they need. The narrative you build has a big impact on how successful you are.
Learn from competitors
Social media is an extension of your competitor research abilities. It’s a great way to understand what your competitors do and what kinds of social media tactics they’re using. The products they promote, how they promote it and if they have any interaction with prospects. These are all things you can learn from a competitor audit on social media.
Social media is a great place to understand what’s working for your competitors and understand your own approach, create content around your products, and factor in successes and failures you may face. For example—for this post that I created the idea came from competitor research and analysis.
Conduct competitor analysis to beat your competition and create much more engaging content than they’re able to create.
A successful social strategy hinges on these pillars:
- Researching and creating accurate buyer personas
- Determining social platforms they’re active on
- Organising and scheduling content.
Of these pillars the most important is researching buyer personas:
How to research buyer personas
Buyer personas are nothing but fictional representations of the ideal kind of prospects you want to target and market to. Identify what they want and why they need your product. Depending on what you sell, you could be targeting millennials with a penchant for listening to clutter-free audio.
Your buyer personas will let you determine the kind of content you need to push out to engage people when marketing on social media. Find out what your audience likes and wants to learn. That’s the starting point from where you can create tailor made content for them.
Determine social media platforms they are active on
As a social marketer you need to be aware of the platforms your prospects are most active on. By segmenting the channels that they most use you know exactly where to be on.
You can also set up social listening tools so you know what are the needs of your audience, what they are talking about your brand or niche in general and how you can help.
At some point people need content for themselves and that’s where your social media content can help.
Organise a schedule for your posts.
One of the easiest ways to lose track of social media activity is to never have an idea of what you’re going to post. That’s where scheduling content in advance can help. Have a content marketing plan—Schedule your posts in advance and monitor interactions and the engagement your content is generating. Most social media engagement tools have tracking tools built in to monitor how far you’re able to succeed.
When marketing on social media, don’t forget to create good captions. Once you have successfully engaged them on social media, it’s time to build your email list and market to them with a welcome series.
Ultimately drive them back to your site.
About the Author
George blogs at KamayoBloggers, a site he recently started to share WordPress and blogging tips online.
